Everything has gone cloudy. Can you see me?

[Barnaby]

Every second organisation and person is venturing into "cloud" at the moment it seems; this new technology that's going to make everything right in the world. I have a couple of side issues with that anyway - its not actually 'new' at all and how many people understand what 'cloud' actually refers to? That's not the point though. For the purposes of right now, I'm going to use 'cloud' to refer to any application which is hosted by, or which hosts my information, elsewhere - in another place or organisation. No doubt you'll see the limitations and flaws of that definition, but for this piece, it servers a purpose.
 
What I've been looking for recently is a way of better organising myself. Not that I'm a total disaster, but it seems that with all these 'i-devices' there really ought to be a great way to share my information . . with myself (?) - not all information, but things like tasks, plans, and so on. I've tried a few apps recently because it seems that the in-built and standard Microsoft apps aren't quite flexible enough or joined-up enough to really address my needs. A couple worthy of note are www.rememberthemilk.com which looks great and works well except for the fact that Outlook integration and real-time sync are paid for extras and I'm convinced at this stage that I can meet my needs for less or better still, my favourite price - free. The one I've really been trying to use and I think I have settled on though is www.wunderlist.com. There are apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac which is great because I find an app to be much more convenient than a web page on Mac and apps for the other devices. There's a raft of things that it allows me to do and it too looks really nice. My ask to the WunderKinder folks is: please add location-based awareness to task lists - for those of us who create lists to remember things but forget to look at the lists, its invaluable if you're iPhone pops up a reminder when you arrive at home, work supermarket. The inbuilt iPhone task tool does it averagely. Remember the Milk does it well because its easy to define your chosen locations for reminders.
 
But this too is beside the point - apologies for the foray into apps. What struck me as I was trying these things out was two things. The cliché question of "where is my data actually going" which I'm less bothered about, although its an interesting question. Should we be worried? Depends on the company I suppose but its hard to tell these days. If its Symantec that’s hosting your data then you're safe. If its a small app-providing company, what do you think? Hard to tell how much infrastructure there is behind this stuff. Presumably a fair bit, even if the app is free. More concerning for me though is the 'social' side of all of these apps. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of social media. So many services and apps I've looked at signing up to recently have asked whether I would like to sign up using my Twitter or Facebook account and if not, whether, once signed up, I would like to share my activity within the app with those social media services. As an average user, how much do any of us actually know about who can view information that we're creating in these apps or data that we're storing in these place - are we inadvertently sharing that information when we assumed it was private. Seriously, who actually reads the fine print? Worse still are the default sharing sites - you will share or you can't sign up for the service. There's raising awareness of your app or service to gain new members and then there's forcing users to share only for the benefit of the app or service itself. That’s an instant no-go for me.
 
So lots of thoughts there but here's another - if my information is stored somewhere else and that’s fine with me, what happens if my information is lost, damaged or otherwise at the place its being held? I backup the data on my laptop and I have been doing so for years. If that information was being stored on a local server in your workplace chances are that its being backed up too, chances are by Backup Exec, in fact (note: "Who's Looking After Your Clouds?" - check out further down my blog) but what about cloud? Cloud, as in public cloud - the one your app data is being held in. From my [work-head] perspective its no different. The backup of that data just happens somewhere else because the data is somewhere else. From another perspective you have to ask a couple of things: how much information am I sharing and with whom and if the answers could be 'lots' and 'a lot of people' because you just don't know and therefore there's a risk to that data, how well is it being protected in case something does happen in that 'somewhere else'. Do you actually know (have seen face-to-face in the last couple of years) all of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers? What's the risk and what's the protection against that risk like? Security is one thing, but backup is always the last line of defence. So interestingly as everything is going 'cloudy' its possible that we can see each other better than ever - perhaps more than we'd like.